Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity Topics in Turkic Syntax; Jaklin Kornfilt March 26-28, 2008 [email protected] Subject case and Agr in two types of Turkic RCs* Jaklin Kornfilt Syracuse University Locality holds between the subject agreement marker and the subject, albeit in different ways, in two types of Turkic RCs. In one type (e.g. Turkish), the modifying clause is a CP, and in the other, it’s a bare TAM- phrase (e.g. Sakha, Uighur). In both types, Agr appears on the phase head: in Turkish, on C, and in Sakha/Uighur, on N/D. The local domain for licensing the subject’s Case (via a probe-goal relation between Agr and subject) is CP for Turkish RCs, and DP for Sakha/Uighur RCs. Two phenomena offer independent motivation: 1. Turkish-type RCs display Complementizer Agreement effects, while Sakha/Uighur type RCs don’t; 2. In both types, generalized binding precludes locally bound resumptive pronouns, with CP as the local domain for the ban in Turkish RCs, and the entire DP in Sakha/Uighur RCs. 1. Introduction and Summary The main topic of this paper is locality. More specifically, I claim that in Turkic RCs, the agreement marker that expresses the phi-features of the modifier clause’s subject determines the case of that subject under strict locality. This is not a surprising claim, but to defend it turns out to be surprisingly challenging, when facts of certain RCs in some Turkic (and some other) languages are considered, where the agreement element and the subject appear to have a non- local relationship: phi-feature Agr is marked on the head of the RC, rather than on the clause’s predicate. It turns out that the head of the RC construction and the subject of the modifier clause are, against all appearances, in a local relationship in those languages. Such a relationship could conceivably be derived via raising of the subject to the specifier position of the RC-head. I argue against * I am grateful to Shigeru Miyagawa for discussion of a number of issues related to this paper, as well as to the audience at WAFL 4 for their comments, especially to Cem Keskin, Masha Polinsky, and Peter Sells. I would also like to thank audiences, especially Peter Cole, Bernard Comrie, and Gaby Hermon, for their comments at related presentations of this material at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in 2003, at the Syracuse University Workshop on Nominalizations, in 2006, at WAFL 3 in Moscow, at ICTL 13 in Uppsala, and at the Cambridge Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Relative Clauses, in 2007. I am indebted to Éva Csató Johanson, the editor of the ICTL 13 proceedings volume, and to Sergei Tatevosov, the editor of the WAFL 3 proceedings volume, for their permission to publish this paper, which is related to my contributions to those volumes (Kornfilt forthcoming a. and b.). The Kirghiz and Kazakh data in the present paper is completely new, while the remainder of the paper is related, but not identical, to those other two papers. Special thanks are due to Mark Brown, for his help with the formatting. The core ideas of the approach presented here were first proposed at the 2003 talk; I am grateful to Nadya Vinokurova for help with Sakha, to Raihan Muhamedowa for help with Kazakh, to Kenjegül Kalieva for help with Kirghiz, and to Phil LeSourd, Raziye Nuri, and Abdurishid Yakup for help with Modern Uighur. Special thanks go to the organizers of WAFL 4, particularly to Cedric Boeckx and to Süleyman UlutaG. such a derivation and claim that at least in two Turkic languages, Sakha and Modern Uighur, the head of the RC and the subject of the modifying clause enter a local relationship with the subject in-situ. Additional facts from two other Turkic languages, Kirghiz and Kazakh, also point in the same direction.1 For this account to be plausible, I make the following central typological claim: (1) The modifier clauses in some of the Turkic languages are more reduced than in others.2 I claim that the non-reduced clauses in the RCs of languages (such as Turkish) that have the full-blown type are CPs, while the reduced ones are bare Tense/Aspect/Mood [TAM] phrases. This makes it possible for the clause- external RC-head (and the phi-feature probe that is merged on it) to enter a local relationship with the clause-internal subject, when that clause is a bare TAM- phrase. (See Miyagawa, this volume, for a very similar approach, arrived at independently, based on different syntactic facts, mainly from Japanese.) This difference gives rise to typological correlations across Turkic languages that have not been described previously in philological or typological literature: While the RCs that host modifier clauses with CP status show Complementizer Agreement (CA) effects, RCs with reduced, non-CP clauses don’t. This contrast goes along with the placement of subject Agreement morphology: In RCs with CP-modifier clauses, the Agr element is placed on the predicate of the modifier clauses; in RCs with reduced, non-CP modifier clauses, the Agr is placed on the RC-head. I claim that in both types of RC, the common denominator is locality; in both types, the phi-feature probe is merged on a phase head: either the head of the CP (if the RC does have a CP), or the head of the DP (if no CP is available). Thus, the phi-feature probe, and its goal, i.e. the subject, are in a local relationship in both instances. The surface realizations, and thus observations, of these analyses are as follows: Languages whose (non-subject) RCs bear subject Agreement on the RC- head (i.e. on D) don’t exhibit a special predicate form on the modifier clause in subject RCs (because the modifier clauses, being bare TAM-clauses, have no C 1 A number of additional Turkic languages (e.g. Uzbek, Turkmen), other non-Turkic, but Altaic languages (e.g. Dagur, a Mongolian language), and some non-Altaic languages spoken in the same geographic region (e.g. Western Armenian, an Indo-European language, and Northern Ostyak, a Ugro-Finnic language) have RCs of the same type. (For a discussion of such RCs in the last two, non-Altaic, languages, cf. Ackerman & Nikolaeva (1997).) Whether all of these RCs are amenable to the same analysis as proposed here for Sakha, Uighur, Kirghiz, and Kazakh, is left for future research. 2 Krause (2001) claims that the modifying clauses in Turkish RCs are reduced. If this were the case, the corresponding clauses in these other Turkic languages would have to be characterized in yet another fashion, since reduction in and of itself wouldn’t draw the necessary distinctions, yet it is clear that in these other Turkic languages, the clauses in question cannot be smaller than TAM- phrases. However, there are empirical reasons, quite independent from the issues discussed here, against Krause’s reduction analysis for Turkish RCs, but a discussion of this point would transcend our purposes here and cannot be undertaken, due to space considerations. Based on the empirical support discussed in the text, as well as the typological considerations just mentioned, the CP- analysis for Turkish clauses in RCs is maintained. and thus can’t exhibit CA effects; I interpret the special predicate form of subject RCs as a CA-effect); languages with RCs whose phi-feature Agr appears on the predicate of the modifier clause in non-subject RCs exhibit a special predicate form for subject RCs—a CA-effect (which is obviously possible only if the clause is a CP).3 On the other hand, both types of these languages conform to a larger generalization: Subject RCs never display overt Agr with the subject, while non- subject RCs do.4 I propose to explain this asymmetry, common to all Turkic languages (which have RCs that exhibit subject Agr, irrespective of its position), via generalized binding, i.e. via a ban (for which there is independent evidence) against locally A-bound pronominals (i.e. locally A-bound resumptive pronouns), and the claim that pro, locally licensed and identified by overt Agr, is a regular pronominal that obeys that ban, just as overt pronominals do. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses Turkish RCs, argues that their modifying clauses are CPs, and proposes separate, but interrelated, accounts for the two main differences between Turkish subject and non-subject RCs; Section 3 discusses the RC construction with the Agr placed on the RC head. Subsections 3.1 through 3.5 illustrate that construction in Sakha, argue against subject raising (to Spec, DP) in their derivation, and propose the present account, based on a reduced, bare TAM-phrase analysis. In 3.6, the Uighur RCs are discussed, the same account is extended to them, and additional arguments against raising of the subject are advanced; examples from Kirghiz and Kazakh are introduced for further support. Section 4 offers conclusions. 2. Turkish Relative Clauses Turkish is a language with RCs whose modifying clauses have, I claim, CP status. According to the typological remarks in the introduction, we would expect two (correlated) properties: 1. the Agr marker should be on the predicate of the modifying clause, i.e. clearly local to the subject, whose Case it determines (since the CP-status of the clause would make the CP-external, and thus phase-external, RC-head and the RC-D non-local with respect to the clause- internal subject, due to the Phase Impenetrability Condition [PIC]—cf. Chomsky (2008)), and 2.